Gardening David Wheeler
A RECENT tonnage of gardening books shows no decline in our horticultural pursuits, and while I cannot claim to have seen and read every new title in the genre, many have come my way – informing, instructing, amusing and frustrating me in about equal measure. But Christmas looms: let’s spotlight the goodies.
Nothing exceeds the scope and splendour of Christopher and Başak Gardner’s Flora of the Silk Road: An Illustrated Guide (I B Tauris £35), a hefty volume to excite serious gardeners, botanists and armchair travellers alike. From its western extremity in Greece, the husband and wife team trek this fabled route towards China via deserts, impenetrable forests and mountain ranges, portraying in colourful prose and dazzling photographs the diverse flora of these diverse lands, many the distant ancestors of our garden favourites.
For oldies whose nostrils still fire on both cylinders there is Stephen Lacey’s Companion to Scented Plants (Frances Lincoln £25), in which the pong supremo considers a thousand different fragrant plants. Lacey’s early rise to fame came in 1986 with the publication of The Startling Jungle, a young man’s grown-up love affair with plants and gardens. I read it on the Tube, wondering how, not yet thirty, he had grasped so much horti knowhow and the joyous knack of sharing it. Rightly, Christopher Lloyd called Lacey ‘a gardener to his fingertips’. Andrew Lawson’s The Gardener’s Book of Colour (Pimpernel Press £25) also chimes with echoes of the past. First published twenty years ago, this true gardener’s manifest became an overnight classic. Pimpernel has slightly reduced its overall dimensions (it’s easier to read in bed) but forsaken nothing of its range and magical enthusiasm.
Winter is a terrific time of the year to plan jaunts to look forward to. Opportunities seem endless in Tania Pascoe’s Wild Garden Weekends (Wild Things Publishing £16.99), a British region-by-region gazetteer that points the way to both familiar and unfamiliar destinations with useful notes on nearby nurseries, B&BS and – always considering ‘the inner man’ – kitchen garden cafés.
I’m not sure that a famous dad with a daughter gaining fame in her own right comprises a dynasty, but Claire Austin seems well on the way to achieving her rosarian father David’s popularity and world reputation. Claire’s great love is for perennial plants (look nowhere else for irises and peonies) and the newly minted Claire Austin’s Book of Perennials (White Hopton Publications £19) portrays her entire catalogue of colourful plants, pinning neat and compact details to each illustrated species and variety. While her nursery is within sight of the Welsh border in Shropshire, her business operates on a mail-order basis, which means that her many covetable plants are but a mouse’s click away.
Frank Lawley’s Herterton House
and a New Country Garden (Pimpernel Press £30) tells the very personal story of a remarkable few acres in windswept Northumberland. Created since 1976 by Frank and his wife, Marjorie, around a farmhouse, byre and granary with ‘beautifully proportioned arches’, this exceptional garden beckons to the gardening cognoscenti like some exotic siren. The Lawleys are unique in today’s fashiondriven gardening world, ‘doing their own thing’, doing it superlatively. The book is required reading for any rookie garden maker, and the garden itself should be on everyone’s visiting itinerary while its begetters are still above ground.
Finally (because we like a tipple, don’t we?) let me alert you to The Drunken
Botanist by Amy Stewart (Timber Press, £14.99). You don’t have to be aged eighteen to buy or read it but, crikey, don’t let it fall into the hands of youth from whom you’ve forbidden the drinkscupboard keys. Cheers!